Pilgrimage to Hell

Chapter Two

Savage eyes watched the line of lights that bobbed gently up and down in the far distance; preternaturally sensitive ears caught the dull roar and rumble of powerful engines. There was forward movement there, an onward surge. The lights were getting closer by the second.

The watcher had greenish skin that looked, at a distance, as if it were faintly scaled, though it was not. The scale effect was just that — an odd skin effect, something he could not wipe off, something he had to live with, some genetic eruption whose exact origin was unknown. It didn't bother him. He was known as Scale and that didn't bother him, either. Nothing bothered him. Mutation was a matter of complete acceptance among mutants; it was only norms who got twitchy.

He had overlarge eyes, black rimmed, deep hollowed. His mouth was wide and thick lipped. His nose was a slight bulge above the mouth, with two tiny orifices; his sense of smell was almost nonexistent.

He rose to his feet, snapped long slender fingers. Another figure, overtall and with very long arms, slipped from behind to hand him a pair of powerful glasses. The man with the faintly scaled skin took the glasses and put them to his eyes and adjusted them.

There were maybe fifteen vehicles in the convoy, including three big war wagons. The man nodded. The Trader. Only the Trader carried that amount of punch.

The Trader was a hard nut to crack. No one had ever managed to take him, though many had tried, both muties and norms. In many ways the Trader was the most powerful man in the land. He had hardware, high powered and deadly, and plenty of it; he had fuel supplies, secret and well hidden, known only to him and his captains, his closest and most trusted confidants; he had contacts, from the civilized East to the primitive West, from the suspicious North to the outright barbaric South. He dealt in weapons, a trade built up over twenty years or more. But he bartered and sold other merchandise, too: food, clothes, gadgets, fuel, generators, wisdom, knowledge. He even dispensed justice in the more outlying regions, in the tiny scattered hamlets hundreds of kilometers from the huge Baronies of the East and South.

He was trusted and he was fair, but he was no simp and his revenge could be devastating. All who knew of the Trader knew the tale of the Eastern town that had tried to mess with him, a town of low morals run by an ambitious madman. The exact nature of their mistake had been lost over the intervening years, but the outcome was retained in the memories of most who had dealings with him. The town had been destroyed, razed to the ground, wiped from the face of the earth. He had spared no one. Such had been his fury that he had massacred the inhabitants to a man, woman, child. And animal. He had not even spared the animals, had not taken them for himself but instead had slaughtered the herds and left the carcasses, and then moved on.

It was a lesson. You did not mess with the Trader.

Sure, there were other traders, men and women who traveled the Deathlands in convoy, bartering and haggling, stealing and slaving, picking up merchandise here, selling it there. But none of them traveled the Trader's routes, none had his expertise, and none had his nose for the hidden Stockpiles that the pre-Nuke military men had laid down more than a century before.

Those were the plums that everyone wanted to pick, the hidden man-made caverns scattered across the land, stuffed with hardware, fuel, weaponry; the secret silos that the governments of the day had ordered to be constructed against a time when the world might be in ruins and power shifted solely to those with the muscle and the guns to hold on to it. The irony was that the Nuke had been so devastating, so ferocious, so unbelievably swift that chains of command all over the world had been destroyed more or less at a stroke, and their secrets had been lost with them, lost for nearly a century.

Now they were being uncovered slowly, very slowly — secrets hidden from most of those who had inhabited the land once known as the United States.

And mostly they were being uncovered by the Trader, who traveled the land, north, south, east, west; who probed and poked and dug and excavated; who journeyed far into regions no man had trod for a century, regions no sane man wished to tread. It was said that the Trader had trekked deep into the heart of the fiery southwest where hurricane-force winds howled across a moonscape where nothing grew, no man lived. It was said that his land wagons had specially reinforced and adapted roofs because he journeyed deliberately into regions where the acids could strip a man to his bones in a second. It was rumored that he had even penetrated the mountains overlooking the bleak western coastal strip, had viewed like a conqueror of old the steaming lagoons, the long jagged fjords thrust deep between craggy peaks, and had sailed the simmering seas below which vast cities lay crumbling and rotting as they slept an eternal sleep.

All this was said; much of it was true. And the proof was the hardware, the strange and incomprehensible artifacts, the sealed crates of exotic foodstuffs he brought back time and again after each trawl through the Deathlands.

The man called Scale handed the glasses back to his companion. He gazed up at the dark sky broodingly, calculating that there was an hour to dawn. No hint of a smile crossed his face, but his dead eyes had come alive.

He said, "Trader."

Not "a trader," noted the man with the very long arms.

"We take him?"

"Sure."

"We take the Trader?" The long-armed man was dubious.

"Sure."

The man thought about this, staring at the line of lights wobbling far away. It seemed to him that Scale was about to bite off more than he could chew. It seemed to him that Scale was in danger of choking himself to death.

"He's heavy."

"So are we."

"Not like him."

Scale shrugged.

"We hit him in the dark. Three war wags. Front, middle, rear. Can't turn in the pass — too narrow. So go for them and hit 'em hard. We got the muscle. We disable the middle so it blocks the road. Rear trucks can't go forward, front can't go back. We hit both ends, simultaneous. Ain't got a prayer."

The man with the long arms pondered this. In principle it sounded good, the perfect ambush. But — the Trader? He bit his lower lip with three sharp, filed-down teeth, the only ones in his mouth.

"He got muscle. Plenty muscle."

"Sure. So have we."

"Not like him."

"We do it."

The long-armed man turned to stare down into the darkness cloaking the patiently waiting band of men below.

"Hellblast, Scale, we already got us a catch. Two land wags, truckin' out to the Darks."

The man with the faintly scaled skin shook his head irritably.

"Ain't enough. Any case, it's the ammo. Trader, he's got plenty ammo, plenty guns. Big mothers."

"Plenty men, too," the long-armed man pointed out.

"Nah. He travels light, from what I hear. Lot of big wind about his manpower. These days, he travel light."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"Fat Harry. Last time there. Said the Trader was gettin' to be an old man, thinkin' of quittin'." He chuckled suddenly, a dry, sour sound. "We'll hurry it along. Quit the fucker ourselves."

"I dunno, Scale. The Trader." The man shook his head glumly.

"Don't forget," said Scale, "what we got."

"We ain't got nothuf."

This time the man with the faintly scaled skin laughed aloud, his eyes wide and crazy.

"We got the stickies, idiot! We got the stickies."

In the lead war wagon, in a small toilet cubicle to the rear, the Trader was being sick. He knelt on the swaying floor, gripping the sides of the aluminum bowl, and heaved four or five times, finally slumping back on his heels against the wall of the cubicle. He was sweating. He wiped his brow with a rag, then wiped his lips, carefully, almost delicately. The noise of the war wag's powerful engine thundered in his ears and he was glad of it. It meant no one could hear him or what he was doing. He clambered to his feet, a powerfully built man with stiff, grizzled hair, and stared down at the contents of the bowl dispassionately. He knew exactly what to expect.

Blood. But this time more of it than ever. Almost looked as if he was hawking his whole nukeshitting guts up.

Hanging over the can was a mirror that bounced gently, clacking with every bump and lurch of the vehicle's wheels and tracks over the rutted road. The Trader stared at himself thoughtfully, a face he saw every day of every week of every month of every year. But older, definitely older. Much older than yesterday, a hell of a sight older than last week. White, too. Unhealthy looking. Once his face used to be red-brown, vigorous, alive. He breathed out slowly, then kicked the flush pedal beside the bowl. The hell with it...

He reached up and opened a small cabinet fixed to the wall. Inside were shelves of bottles and jars. His eyes took in the various colors, considered the positions of each container. As he could neither read nor write, it was the only way he could distinguish their contents.

He took down a bottle of green liquid, uncapped it, wiped the neck with his rag, took a long swig. He shook his head, washing the stuff around his mouth, then threw his head back and gargled noisily. The bellow of the engine drowned all sounds. He spat into the small hand-basin beside the closed gunport and twisted the tap, and water from the tank in the roof washed the green liquid away.

He put the bottle back and lit a cigar. That would take the smell of peppermint away, right enough. The Trader chuckled, forgetting for a second the terrible ache in his guts as the thought hit him that the mouthwash, plus the other bottles of the same stuff from the same cache, was probably the only mouthwash within a few hundred thousand kilometers of him. Weird stuff. Stuff that had been stored deep down someplace, freak material survivors of fire and ice, and often to be found in huge amounts, "factory fresh" it sometimes said on the labels. There weren't many of these finds, but there were some, and they were mighty strange in their bright packaging and their huge quantities. Such caches were usually buried deep under rubble, and if it was a huge, sparkling supply of mouthwash that you found after all that digging, you were more than likely to think it not worth the effort. Except the Trader. He liked the stuff. He liked the joke inherent in luxury products suddenly found in quantities far out of all proportion to their usefulness.

He slapped at his face, his cheeks, hard, to get some color back, breathing in sharply, squaring his shoulders. He took a long pull at his moldy old cigar and let the smoke drool out of his mouth. Then he pulled open the door.

The Trader moved fast down the narrow passageway outside. On his right was a machine-gun blister, occupied by a dark-skinned youth who briefly nodded to him before letting his eyes flick back to the port above the gun and to the rushing darkness outside the bulletproof glass.

The Trader, cigar firmly clamped between uneven yellowed teeth, walked on, climbed some steps, pulled himself into the main cabin area of the vehicle.

It had once been a mobile army command post — long, long ago, back when there'd been an army to command. It had been his very first acquisition, maybe a score and a half years ago. He and Marsh Folsom had discovered it while escaping from a bunch of cannies in the Apps, or the Applayshuns as some old folks insisted on calling them. A rockslide, old, maybe triggered originally by Nuke tremors, had uncovered a vast man-made cavern, reaching deep into the heart of the thickly wooded slopes. Inside was Golconda. That was what Marsh, a man who'd read books, had said as they'd stared in awe at the rows and rows of parked vehicles, all kinds, all types, that stretched away from them into the gloom. The MCP had been the nearest, a huge mother, though not as huge as she was now.

Over the years the Trader had added to it, fixing gun ports here, rocket pods there, machine-gun blisters everywhere. His engineers — once he'd started up in business, recruited reliable men, using the Applayshun cavern as his main HQ — had fixed pierced-steel planking double thickness all around it, modified the interior and rewired it to his specifications, adapted and strengthened it. It was now a death-dealing juggernaut, capable of considerable speed on the flat, with retractable tracks for the rough terrain over which it surged with incredible vitality for its bulk. It was also the flagship of the Trader's fleet of war wags, land wags, trucks, powered vehicles and personnel carriers.

The Barons of the East had their ramshackle armies, their trucks, their materiel, their war wags. But it was pretty much penny-ante stuff, and in any case most of it had been supplied by the Trader directly, and although he could not stop — not that he wanted to — the slow march of a manufacturing industry that had started in a small way a generation back — the crude electrification of small plants in certain places, mostly based on the utilization of hundred-year-old equipment that had survived; knowledge gained from old manuals and handed-down memories and skills — he could still see to it that he, and he alone, controlled the heavy hardware that had been salted away so many years before. He still had his secrets, though there were many who plotted and schemed in smoke-filled rooms to wrest them from him, many who saw him as the ultimate block to their own acquisition of power.

The Trader's philosophy had changed through the years. At first he'd sold, bartered and traded damned near anything and everything he could lay his hands on, for gold, coin and creds. His success was due solely to his own natural vigor and energy and the smartness of Marsh Folsom, who could read and write and because of this could go some way to deciphering some of the meager clues they had found in the original Apps caverns and other Stockpiles.

Folsom knew from his reading that the old-timers used incredibly complex pieces of machinery called computers, and he figured that much of the paperwork they had found in the Stockpiles had a lot to do with those things, but unless you had been trained how to use them there was no way you could crack the code. Although both he and the Trader had actually seen these computer machines in their travels around the Deathlands — mostly wrecked, unsalvageable, though there'd been some that had appeared intact — you also needed power, a lot of power, to turn the blasted things on. And even if you could somehow work it, Folsom knew they'd still be useless because no one could comprehend how to handle them. A live machine you didn't understand was as redundant as a dead one you did. Maybe more so.

Still, they'd persevered. Folsom had followed up clues on military maps, had pinpointed locations, areas of possibility. The Trader had gone out to those locations and dug around, sometimes hitting pay dirt, more often than not drawing one big fat zero. The percentage against them over the years was depressingly high. In every ten tries, maybe one was on target.

Their second major find had been a sea of gas in vast containers hidden below the peaks of the mountain range that stretched toward the cold zone to the north, maybe two hundred kilometers beyond the ruins of Boston. It had been a bitch to transport shipments of it the enormous distance back to the Applayshuns through rugged and dangerous terrain, frequently fighting arunning battle with muties, mannies, cannies — the muties with pre-cog powers even more eerie than the doomies' — and sheerly vicious norms who attacked from crazed blood lust alone. But out of that terrifying odyssey had grown the Trader's band, for although Folsom played around with his maps and files, the Trader recognized the more immediate need for satellite recruitment, a nucleus of hardcase guards and blasters who would fall in with his ideas, obey orders, keep their mouths shut tight.

That had taken time. You couldn't simply grab the first guys who came along. The Trader wanted — needed — integrity in his followers: fearlessness, nerve, a resolute loyalty and maybe something approaching devotion. And once he'd got what he wanted, or as nearly as he decided he was ever going to get, he ran a tight ship.

You wanted creds? You worked for them. You wanted a life that, hard as it might be, was a hell of a sight easier than that experienced by the vast majority of the Deathlands dwellers? You had to earn it. You wanted sex? You either got yourself a solid partner, or you paid for it. It was readily available; there were plenty of burgs in the Deathlands that were simply open brothels. What you did not do, however, was grab it any old damned where. You did not use force. You did not kill to get it. Anybody who did, and was caught, faced summary execution, no reprieve. It was one of the Trader's iron rules. Even when he'd destroyed Cooperville, there'd been no rape.

It was one of the things that had bolstered his rep, given him the key to all those small towns that were tight little enclaves, well defended, well manned — all those small towns with their strong guard units who turned away other, lesser, traders who were not so choosy in the way they conducted their business; who were, when you got down to it, little more than marauding bands of killers and cutthroats, looters and pillagers. That was not, and never had been, the Trader's way, and most recognized this in the Deathlands, and welcomed him with open arms instead of gun barrels.

Still, his methods had changed over the years. Whereas before he'd been willing to get shot of all he came across for the best price he could find, now he held back on much he discovered in his foraging trips. In his early days he'd let too many guys have too much hardware, too much high-powered hardware, and it seemed to him now that such a practice had been not merely unwise but an outright disaster whose hideous ramifications lingered with him still. He had come to realize that unwittingly, thoughtlessly — greedily — he had armed groups whose aims were by no means altruistic, whose ideas were in fact solely concentrated on power for its own sake.

As the years had gone by the Trader had brooded long on the guns problem and had still come up with no firm solution. You had to have weapons to defend yourself. In an ordered world, maybe, you relied on those forces you yourself set up to guard your rights and liberties, hold the peace, defend the weak against the strong. And even then, even in the most orderly society there might ever have been, there would still be those who secretly sought evil and who therefore preyed on the less fortunate.

And what if those who carried the weapons, those whom you'd set up, turned against you, were corrupted by the very power you had bestowed upon them? It happened. It always happened. Marsh Folsom, who knew about these things, had said it had happened all the time, throughout recorded history.

Because the trouble was that for some people power was a heady drug. The more they had, the more they wanted. It was that simple.

And yet it seemed to the Trader, thinking about such things, arguing the problem out with his captains through the long watches of the night, over many years, that though in a sense he'd been dead wrong to let loose all that vicious ordnance he'd discovered, in a sense he'd been dead right.

There was no denying that he had armed certain communities, deep in the wilder reaches of the Deathlands, that, because of him, had stayed intact and had flourished when by all rights they ought to have gone under, been ravaged by the fireblasting drivers and muties and crazies who roamed the land. At least with weapons they'd stood a chance.

The fact was, whichever way you cut it, a weaponless burg didn't have a hope. Not now. Not in these wild times. The Trader has seen what could happen to such communities too often to deny this. There had been many towns, mostly of a strong religious persuasion of one kind or another, that had denounced violence, renounced weaponry; that had proclaimed a new era of peace and harmony following the Apocalypse. All had fallen prey to the men of violence who had renounced nothing. Sometimes they had merely been invaded, enslaved. Sometimes, dreadfully, serfdom had been the least of their woes.

The Trader acknowledged to himself and to those closest to him that the blame for many of these atrocities had to find its way back to him. He sometimes wondered how in hell what passed for civilization these days had managed to make it through the past hundred years or so, not only through the Cold, which by all accounts had been grim enough, but beyond, when folks had started crawling out of their holes to grab what was left after the collapse.

It was true that the Nuke had not destroyed everything, and it was equally true that somehow thousands had managed to make it through those long years when it was said that the sun had died. From what the Trader had heard from that generation, it was a time of horror and a time of terror, and in many ways it had gotten worse when, especially in the East, the seasons had slowly begun to return and people had started to drag themselves into the daylight of a new and terrifyingly transformed world.

But having acknowledged his culpability in the matter of trading in the kind of materials that might better have been left undiscovered, he nevertheless felt that in some small way he had also been able to lift people back onto their feet again by rediscovering creation. For in these strange and secret Stockpiles were generators, survival equipment, processed food that could last for centuries if necessary, tools, fuel, the means to learn, the means to expand, the means to grow. All this, too, the Trader had hauled around the Deathlands, leaving communities better equipped to battle with the ever-looming dark that still threatened to overwhelm what was left.

And whereas before he'd been greedy, careless in his dealings, now he was more scrupulous, more circumspect. Now there were things he discovered, then swiftly reburied. He still broke out in a sweat when he recalled the time, five or six years before, when Ryan and Dix had followed up a lead left by Marsh Folsom and found, buried in the hills of what had once been a place called Kentucky, an immense collection of sealed airtight drums, tens of thousands of them, all neatly tabbed and docketed, all with that deadly and unmistakable symbol stamped into their casings.

The juice they called nerve gas. Hundreds of thousands of liters of it.

The same kind of shit that had rained down during the Nuke, from both sides, leaving an appalling legacy behind it, a legacy that still lingered and would still linger for decades, maybe generations, far into the bleak future.

They'd closed down the cavern, the Trader and Ryan and Dix, buried the entrance under a controlled landslip, destroyed all the paperwork that had led Marsh Folsom into pinpointing the area as a Stockpile possibility in the first place, and hoped for the best. It was all you could do, but it still gave the Trader nightmares when he slept, still gave him the shakes when he awoke.

Because there was always the outside chance that some other guy might just fall over it, even buried as it was... somehow, sometime. There was always that chance. Some guy by no means as scrupulous, some guy who might well figure out a way actually of using it, of bringing even more horror to a world already stuffed with horror up to the gullet.

There were times when the Trader felt burdened with the immense weight of secrets he had uncovered, the vast power he had but could not use, the huge guilt load he — and he alone now that Marsh Folsom had gone — inescapably carried.

Sure, he had Ryan and Dix. The situation was tight with them as with no one else he could think of. But they had only arrived in the past ten years. Less. They had not been with him since the beginning, all those years ago. The weight they carried was lighter by far than the tremendous and often crushing burden that seemed at times ready to pulverize his soul.

And now the blood. That was a new and special weight on him because, apart from anything else, it put a horizon to his life... a horizon that he was inevitably getting closer to by the month. By the day.

By the hour.

He sucked at the cigar, took it out of his mouth, blew smoke into the air. His head buzzed, his arms and legs felt as though they'd been fashioned out of lead. He felt old. He felt he knew what it must be like to be 110.

He was only fifty-three.

"You okay?"

"Sure I'm okay. Can't a feller take a crap once in a while?"

The Trader glared at his war captain as he strode across the wide cabin. Raven-haired, the young man called Ryan Cawdor stood just over six feet in his boots yet seemed far taller. The Trader had known instantly, the first time he'd seen Ryan, that here was a man he could not only entrust with his life, but one who could inspire trust in others, a man for whom other men might well lay down their own lives.

That was a dangerous power to own, and there was no denying that Ryan could be a dangerous man. Rangy, limber, yet powerfully muscled, with that shock of thick night-dark curly hair, that single eye, intensely, chillingly blue, able to penetrate to the very core of a man's being, and the long scar slash from corner of eye to corner of mouth that no amount of sunlight could burn brown and that at times of stress and fury seemed almost to glow with a livid fire — this man was a fierce and relentless war captain. Yet that was by no means the whole story, as the Trader well knew, for Ryan was no mindless human bludgeon intent on berserk savagery to gain a particular goal, but a cunning, wily fighter, a realist, a pragniatist who would battle against all odds, yet knew to the instant when to retire in good order, when to conserve his forces.

The circumstances of their first meeting had not been auspicious. It was hard to think about trusting a person when that person had a heavy-caliber automatic jammed into the back of your skull and was whispering in your ear that one stupid move would bring about instant dissolution of the brain pan.

At the time the Trader had been sitting at the wheel of his personal war buggy, and in fact just five seconds before had unlocked it and climbed in after checking that all the locks were secure and no one had been tampering with them.

So much for security. So much for the antipersonnel device that ought instantly to have taken the arm off any guy who so much as touched the outside of the damned door.

But Ryan was good with locks — although even he now acknowledged the superiority of J. B. Dix when it came to the lock-picker's art. It was one of Ryan's finer points, the ability, if a guy was more skillful than he, to recognize the fact and admit it. And also, of course, he was on the run. These elements combined meant that the Trader's super-secure and seemingly impregnable war buggy was easy meat.

The Trader had been finishing some business in one of the then typical roaring towns in the center of the Deathlands — not that the situation had changed much in a decade; there was still an abundance of such pest holes scattered about the land — and he had been only too willing to put his foot down when ordered and, in the muttered words of the unseen man crouching behind him, "Get the hell out" fast. The land wag train had been waiting for him and ready to go a couple of klicks out of town. This was clearly no surprise to the stranger, who had chosen his getaway vehicle with great care.

And when they'd both climbed out of the vehicle and the Trader had turned and gazed at the man who was still covering him, he'd made his mind up on the instant. Had known with complete and utter certainty that this was the guy he wanted, the guy he'd been unconsciously searching for for years. With the automatic still pointed unwaveringly at him, at a point just below his heart for maximum incapacitation without, quite, the finality of instant death, he had offered the unknown man a place in his organization. The unknown man, just as swiftly, had shrugged his shoulders, holstered the shooter and accepted.

He called himself Ryan, but had offered nothing else about himself — not his background, close kin, place of origin, taste in women: nothing. In particular, he had not explained why he was on the run or who he was running from. It had taken the Trader some time — about five blasted years — to piece a pattern together, put Ryan into some kind of context. Even now there were blank pages, areas where information was not so much sketchy as entirely absent. But at least he had come to know who Ryan was and why he had landed up in the Deathlands as a runner, an outcast. At least he now knew why the guy refused trips to certain of the Eastern Baronies, why he never spoke about his past, why at times he never spoke, period.

Why he lacked an eye.

It was difficult for the Trader to identify why he had trusted Ryan on sight, and it was especially difficult — almost impossible, in fact — to sustain that trust when he discovered who Ryan really was and what he had done, or at least what he was supposed to have done. That was so grisly a crime, so appalling, so outright wicked an act of sheer malevolence and evil that even by the pretty abysmal standards of what passed for civilization in the late twenty-first century, it had hit an all-time low.

A man who did that wasn't fit to live.

And yet, and yet...

Instinct — his prime, and priceless, asset: worth more to him than all the jack, all the spare change in the known world because it had never yet let him down — told the Trader that this was a man of probity, a man of honesty and integrity, a man of high courage who would never stoop to a mean act or betray a trust.

And so it had proved. From day one of their now-decade-long association, the Trader had not regretted taking the guy on, not for a second. He'd had moments of doubt, one or two — such as when he'd fitted that highly significant, not to say shocking, piece into the jigsaw that portrayed the man's past — but they'd not lasted long. The Trader had backed his instinct and, as far as he was concerned, once again it had not betrayed him.

The war wagon bucked violently and lurched to one side, then righted itself under the skillful hands of its driver, Ches. Things slid off shelves, clattered to the metal-plated floor, Cohn, the radioman, who also handled the navigation, muttered a curse and bent to retrieve protractors, pencils, a steel rule.

J. B. Dix, seated in the co-driver's swivel chair, smoking a long thin black cheroot that looked as unappetizing as the Trader's cigar, half turned to stare impassively back at his chief.

"You want to complain about this road, boss. It's a disgrace."

Despite the gnawing fire in his stomach, the Trader chuckled.

"Teague's territory, J.B. Or what he claims is his. Road care's a low priority around here. He's got other things to occupy his mind."

"Or what passes for his mind."

"Yeah, like how to dig up more of the yellow stuff at less cost," Ryan said. "Or no cost at all."

Dix lifted an eyebrow and Ryan nodded at the unspoken question.

"Slaving."

"He's getting to be a big man. Gotta lotta boot," muttered Dix.

"Come a long way," agreed Ryan.

J. B. Dix sucked on his crudely rolled cheroot. He was the Trader's main lieutenant, known as the Weapons Master. Whereas the Trader was merely a businessman, it was Dix who had the knowledge of weaponry, booby-traps and so on. A thin, intense, bespectacled man with a receding hairline, a penchant for thin black cheroots, a fast but very devious mind and a terse, monosyllabic conversational style, it was Dix the Weapons Master's destiny to become a close personal ally of Ryan's.

The war wag's engine bellowed throatily as Ches took her up the dial. In front of him, across the front of the cab and below the narrow, bulletproof see-through windshield was a bewildering array of screens and dials, button sets and circuit breakers. Not many of these were in use. Originally all, including the huge vehicle's weaponry, had been linked to a central control computer, but as no one had ever been able to figure out how it worked, the Trader's mechs had ripped the guts out of everything and started over. Only the fascia remained, to confuse any hijacker who through some incredible stroke of good fortune might manage to get inside the war wag's cabin.

"The way I see it," said Ryan softly, "he's come a damned sight too far." He stared accusingly at the Trader.

"We've been through this a thousand times, Ryan. My word is my bond. You ought to know that by now. It's the only reason I've stayed in business. Two years ago I took Teague's hand and promised him a fat delivery. That's what we have here, and I can't back out. Fireblast it, man!" he suddenly exploded, "you know damned well I've pulled back on everything! He wanted twenty cases of auto-rifles. He's getting eight. He wanted fifteen boxes of grenades. He's getting six, and those are stun not frag, and he knows we know the difference. I've pared the whole consignment to the bone and he's not going to be happy."

"Too bad. The guy's a leech. He's getting more greedy and more dirty by the hour. He'll screw us if he thinks he can and the way things are, that's exactly what's going to happen."

"I know that," barked the Trader. "I know all about Jordan Teague. Hell, I traded stuff with the son of a bitch, from the very first cache, twenty-five years ago." He took a pull at the cigar, coughed a little, "Or thereabouts. He was a rat then and he's a rat now. I know it. But I shook his hand. The deal goes through."

The Trader swung around and glared at no one in particular. Dix was staring at the radiant ribbon of road, picked out by the twin spotlights located high above the cab, protected by wire mesh against a sniper's bullets.

Darkness clung to the light's penumbra. The highway unwound before them, potholed and rutted.

Ryan leaned against the steel ladder that led up to the MG-blister built into the roof of the cabin. He shrugged, glanced at Cohn.

"How long?"

Cohn said, '"Bout a half hour to dawn. Hills ahead. The road goes up. That'll slow us. Pass through the hills, and beyond that, maybe two hours to Mocsin."

The Trader said, "We stop five klicks out. Take this one and the two big trucks in. If I know Teague, we'll have to wait a day before the bastard'll see us."

"He's getting fancy as well as greedy."

"He's a rich man, Ryan. He knew folks'd come back to gold, knew it'd be in demand someday. So he created the demand, he hurried things along. Smart businessman."

"And prime shit."

"Sure." The Trader grinned suddenly, his face a waxy pallor. "Like every businessman since the world began, or so I'm told. Like me."

Cohn snickered. He checked his pocket watch, reached out a hand and flicked a switch in front of him. Atmospherics crackled loudly, then died. Cohn leaned across the table and began checking out the rest of the convoy.

Ryan walked to the rear of the cabin. There was a passageway that led to the armory, the bunk rooms, the kitchen facility. Over the roar of the engines he could hear Loz, the cook, bawling some piratical song or other as he prepared breakfast. To his left were steps leading down to the toilet. He stared down the short shaft up which the Trader has so recently emerged jauntily, waving his cigar. He could still smell the fumes trapped down there, the fumes that, on the Trader himself, powerful as they were, had not quite hidden the even more powerful smell of peppermint.

The Trader was dying.

Ryan knew the Trader was dying. J.B. agreed with him. Both men — war captain and weapons master — had made a compact to say nothing to anyone else, least of all to the Trader himself. The Trader was a proud man; he refused to admit to any physical weakness or debility, and death was the ultimate, final debility.

Ryan had noted the evidence: the racking, lung-shredding cough in the mornings, the sickness he thought no one knew about, the grayness of face, splashes of blood he'd not noticed. It all added up. The disease was eating the Trader up and it was getting worse, heading inexorably toward the final dreadful extremity.

And although there were medicos back in the Apps, the old bastard refused to see them, under any circumstances. Didn't trust them. He'd had a kid brother who had been shot up in the legs years back and had been put to the knife. But the doc had bungled. The kid had gotten gangrene, had died in terrible agony, rotting away before the Trader's eyes. Since then, forget it — no quacks.

Ryan didn't know what to do. For once in his life he felt helpless, useless. The Trader had taken him in, had given him back something he thought he'd lost forever, and now, when the Trader needed help desperately, there was no way of giving it to him.

Ryan went down the steps, clinging to the rail as the big war wag lurched. Crouching in his gun port, the dark-faced kid called Ell glanced around at him as he approached and shook his head.

"Nothing. This is an easy one, Ryan. No problems."

Ryan's mouth twisted slightly.

"Don't put the hoodoo on us, kid. We're not there yet. These hills we're entering..." He made a thumbs-down gesture. "Bad muties. Full of them."

"They won't bother us. Ain't no marauders got half what we got. We could cream 'em up."

"Hasn't stopped others from trying."

Ryan stared bleakly out of the gun port. It was still dark, but dawn raced up behind them. And Mocsin was getting closer by the minute. His mouth twisted up again as he thought of the gross figure of Jordan Teague, self-proclaimed Baron of these territories. Ryan hated the thought that they were carrying arms to him, but he acknowledged that the Trader was right: you kept your word even to scum, unless they really crossed you. If you began breaking your word, folks'd start getting edgy with you, even if they knew all the circumstances. If you broke your word once you could do it twice.

Trouble was, that fat bastard Teague was probably buying guns from other traders, was probably building up an awesome armory. Rumor was strong, too, that in the past couple of years Mocsin had become a hellhole, a dirty beacon that beckoned only the most viciously depraved of men, rad-rats, cannibals, barely human creatures who because of their terrible mutations and deformities had been squeezed dry of any kind of humanity whatsoever.

It sounded to Ryan as if Jordan Teague was gathering muscle for some grim purpose, and the more you traded stuff to the guy the more quickly that purpose would be achieved.

He said, "You keep your eyes wide open, kid. First moving shadow you see, hit it. Hit it hard. Take no chances."

He turned abruptly. He moved back toward the steps and began mounting them. And froze as he caught the sudden shrill squawk from the radio in the cabin above, the glitz of atmospherics, the harsh yell of shock that cracked across the airwaves.

Even as he vaulted up the last remaining steps, the alarm started howling and he heard the Trader shouting, "Brake!"

Ryan slammed across the cabin, reaching up for and grabbing his automatic rifle as he did so, flicking the selector to three-shot and slinging it as he reached the driver's area, clutching the back of Dix's chair as the huge vehicle lost its forward motion.

Cohn was gabbling into his mike, men were tumbling down from the upper chambers and Ryan could hear the thud of boots behind him as more men disgorged from the bunk rooms, the jittery MG-like rattle of rifle checks and mag slams.

"Teague?" he snapped.

"Who knows. Doubtful. Muties, more like." The Trader was ramming a mag up into a battered-looking Armalite rifle as he spat the words out, his face drawn, his eyes flickering around the cabin.

Ryan stared forward. The road ahead, seen through the narrow windshield, was empty of movement — human movement; otherwise, it was alive with tracer streams from the cabin-roof machine gun as the gunner sent firelines exploding up and down the potholed surface, hammering into the rocks that loomed all about.

They were still moving slowly forward, but then Cohn said tensely, glancing around from the radio, "She's out of it. Maybe immobilized."

"Tell 'em to hold on." The Trader gestured to Ches. "Closedown." He turned to Ryan. "Number Four truck. Blown, that's what's happened. Land mine maybe. The rear end, I understand. Now they can't move, and neither can the rest of the train. Can't pass 'em, either. Too damned narrow."

Ryan sprang up the steel ladder into the MG-blister, squeezed himself up behind the gunner's chair. O'Mara, the gunner, was training around, weaving short-burst tracer patterns up and down the road and across, kicking up dust and blacktop chunks, then easing himself back to angle high into the rocks each side. Ryan stared back along the war wag's roof, saw the convoy as a drunken line of lights stretching away and down, those vehicles at the rear still moving slowly, closing up. Three vehicles back from the war wag, fire could be seen, not strong, a dull red glow that flickered feebly against the bright spot shafts from the cab-mounted searchlights on each land wag and truck. But Ryan could see nothing else. No movement, no human presence. No sudden and erratic stabs of red muzzle-flash. He turned to stare frontward again. The road was picked clean for yards ahead, empty of anything.

He said, "Cool it. Don't waste ammo."

He scrambled down the ladder and strode to the radio op.

"What gives?"

Cohn shrugged, puzzled.

"No alarms. Just Number Four's blown. Lost all traction. Everyone else is saying no problems. Four's starting to burn but they reckon they can contain it. They'll have to step outside. I'll tell..."

"No. Wait."

"Hell, Ryan. S'just an old land mine is all. Coulda been there since the Nuke. Been waiting for years. Or maybe fell off a land wag, I dunno. Into a chuckhole. That dink McManus just happened to steer his truck right atop it. Wham!" Cohn stared up at him. "Number Four's gonna burn up unless they get outside to it, and..." he gestured at a clipboard of papers by his side, "...she's got bang-bangs on her."

"Wait!"

Cohn shrugged and went back to his mike as the tall man swung away. Ryan didn't like the explanation about a land mine waiting all that long a time before deciding to blow. It was perfectly possible, but he didn't like it. This pass was too damned narrow. It should have blown years ago. There must have been a hundred vehicles of one kind or another traveling this stretch over the past century. This was the main trekline to Mocsin. It ought to have been triggered before.

Nor did he like the idea that a mine had fallen off a truck grinding up this wrecked road in the recent past. Because if it had simply bounced off somehow, it wouldn't have been primed and ready. In any case, landies were too expensive, too valuable, to leave on a truck where they could pitch over the side or off the back.

"Still nothing?" he said.

Cohn said, "Still tight. 'Cept for Number Four. They're getting a mite twitchy, Ryan."

"Tell 'em to hold on."

There were six exit points on the war wag. One, a hatch to the roof; one at the rear, presided over by two MGs; two toward the rear, one each side, above the back portions of the port and starboard rocket tubes; an escape hatch below the driver's chair, very tight, very secure; and one that opened out, portside, opposite though back from the radio table.

Ryan knew without needing to check that now all four main doors were surrounded on the inside by weaponed-up men, ready to sell their lives dearly, five-man squads for each. Nor did he need to check whether all of these doors were primed, for he knew that Ches would automatically have triggered the internal locks electrically as soon as the alarm, now silent, had started yowling over the sound system. That killed the carefully engineered boobies set into the locks themselves. But still no one could simply open up from outside and walk in — door control was on the inside.

The Trader was seated in Dix's chair, ready to take over if Ches caught it somehow. Dix was at the rear, in command there. Two runners were ready, two kids in their late teens, positioned one each end of the long vehicle, in case radio contact died on them or was knocked out. And above, another man had gone to join O'Mara, with a signal lamp. And in each of the massive war wags it would be the same: men jumping to their places smoothly, fluidly, without thinking about it for a second.

Here the five-man squad was flung out around the cabin area: one crouched in the well that dropped to the head, an MG trained at the door; two men in the passageway leading to the bunk-rooms, one lying on the floor, the other flattened against the wall angle; one man beside the radio table, auto-rifle fixed on a point about a foot above the bottom of the door itself; the fifth behind the door, the first to fire, ready to jump into the opening and pour steel-jacketed death into the night. Cohn crouched over his wall transceiver, whispering at it, uncomfortably aware as always that he would be literally a sitting target once the door was open.

Ryan killed the lights, turning the large cabin into a place of shadows weirdly lit by the driver-control lights and lamps in the bunk-room corridor. He pressed two buttons on a small console beside the door, flicked two long bolts, twisted at the handle with his left hand while stabbing a finger at another button on the panel. A small bulb in the panel remained dark.

"External lights've gone, or been blown. This could be it."

He shoved the door open with his boot and sprang back, to be greeted by darkness outside, darkness that was not night darkness but deep dawn-gray. As his eyes became accustomed to the near absence of light he could just make out a jumble of rocks near the edge of the road where nothing moved. His auto-rifle was held two handed, trigger ready. Adrenaline was boosting into his bloodstream. He could hear nothing. Every vehicle in his land wag train had rolled to a halt.

Then he glanced down. He saw the hand, long fingered and bony, appear as though by magic at the bottom of the doorway, something clutched in it. The hand jerked, unclenched, disappeared. A steel ball clattered fast across the floor toward him.

Without conscious thought, he reacted so his right boot hit the object on the bounce, sent it sailing back out into the night again, his right finger squeezing off two 3-round bursts of automatic fire that angrily highlighted the face of the man flattened against the wall beside the door. The he was diving to his right and screaming, "They're under us!"

His yell was lost in the cracking blast of the grenade as it ripped itself apart among the boulders, sending steel shards and bits of rock whistling in through the door.

Ryan rolled, shot to his feet almost in one fluid movement and lunged at the doorway, his rifle flicked to full automatic and spewing rounds, hot brass clattering against the steel wall nearest him. As he reached the doorway, two shadowy figures vaulted up into the space, only to be punched back shrieking, their chests slug-stitched, their backs spraying blood and bone. Ryan grabbed the handle, pouring more lead down into the road, and yanked on it, slamming the door tight. He shot the bolts, breathing hard, then swung around on Cohn, his brain already working out survival details.

"Get hold of Four. Tell 'em to abandon ship. Up through the roof and jump for Three. There's probably guys crawling all over the place, so watch the hell out. Tell 'em the last man out must leave a four-minute booby as near as possible to their cargo. Tell Two and Three we're shifting butt right now. Tell the rear trucks to backpedal fast."

Cohn went into smooth automatic, playing with his switches, muttering inaudibly into his throat mike.

"Move it, Ches!" snapped Ryan, and grabbed for a handhold as the huge war wag lurched forward with a mighty howl, gathering speed and lumbering onward.

The Trader said, "Must've been well hidden in those rocks. Didn't see a nukeblasted thing."

"They were on the road. Crazies!" Ryan told him. "We probably flattened a score before the guy who mattered managed to grab hold of Four. Suicidal fuckers!"

Now they could hear bullets slamming into their armor, a steady muted rumble of lead on steel as though little men with hammers were drumming up a crazy war dance. The war wag bucked and crashed along, its engine roaring as the slope steepened.

"Nice place to die," muttered Ches, then yelled, "I don't believe it!"

Ahead, far ahead, the road had opened up, a part of it revealing red flashes, tracer lines soaring toward them. Rounds hammered over the front of the lurching vehicle, banged on the bulletproof glass of the windshield.

"Tunnels! Tunnels under the road! When we slowed for the slope, that's when they jumped us, grabbed our underside."

Now the MG-blister above their heads awoke into deadly life and tracers curved down toward the flapped tunnel trap, smashing into it, ripping it apart, sending it bounding away into the shadows beyond the searchlight's glare. O'Mara poured fire straight into the hole, the angle of fire steepening as they roared nearer and nearer.

Cohn said, "Four's out but seems like there's a hand-to-hand atop Three. It's getting rough out there..."

Then he broke off as Ches, his voice a hoarse croak of panic, said, "Hellfire, they got stickies!"

Ryan swung around, saw with a chill of horror four fingerlike appendages appear from out of sight below the windshield, slap hard on to the glass and flatten out slimily, suctioning to the smooth surface. Another four-finger hand whipped up into view, this one clutching a flat black object, which was slammed against the glass. The two hands vanished from sight.

Ches screamed, "Limpet mine!"